I don't know where I'm going until I get there...

Posted on 2004/01/02 21:50:39 (January 2004).

...is a song my Dad used to sing in the car, largely it seems to wind up the rest of my family. This however seems to sum up really well how I went about planning today, and it was actually really nice. We'd originally planned to go into London, but following the excesses of new year, we'd overslept somewhat, and ended up getting out of bed around midday. By the time we'd had a bite to eat, washed and so on, it was already half past one. Given that it takes about an hour and a half to get to London, and Chie mainly wanted to go for shopping, we ended up giving up on that particular plan.
Determined not to have a totally wasted day, we then drove to Halford's to look for a new fan belt for Chie's car (it has been squealing a lot, and gets on Chie's nerves a bit). Given that they didn't have the right kind of Hayne's manual we gave up on that too, and decided to head off somewhere for afternoon tea. I did, however, managed to change the right brake light, and then later on the right indicator, which made me feel surprisingly proud of myself.
After leaving Halford's car park, we drove in an almost random direction for a while, until we happened to end up in Henley. In "Henley Tea Rooms" we treated ourselves to two scones each, a toasted teacake, and a fairly pointless cheese sandwich. After tea, as we were both still enjoying our aimless meandering, we decided to proceed on to Windsor, as we both vaguely thought there was some kind of jazz cafe or something there. There didn't seem to be, but we had a nice wander round nonetheless. I'd never been to Windsor before, and hadn't realised how nice it actually was. I made a mental note that it might make a good venue for the next in my series of historic pub crawls.
On the way back from Windsor, we considered stopping off "somewhere nice" for dinner. We didn't quite manage dinner, in the end, but settled for a quick drink in a pub I'd heard about in Upper Basildon. I'd been told it was called the Bumblebee, but what we found was a pub called the Beehive. It was very nice nonetheless. All in all a very pleasing day - having gone out in the car with the sole intention of getting a new fan belt, we ended up on a really nice driving tour encompassing Henley, Windsor and Upper Basildon. This bodes well for 2004, after last year becoming increasingly concerned about how planned and predictable life was, the new year has already kicked off with the opposite. I wonder if there is any significance in the chinese years - 2003 was the sheep, which I guess implies doing the same as everyone else and generally being pretty boring. 2004 is the year of the monkey, which hopefully brings with it connotations of being a bit cheeky, err, and spontaneous, err, or something like that.

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